No one but Ethel knew how Sara had protected her sister by saying “No, no, no!” and stamping her foot. And if you’d looked at her face at that moment, the word no meant more than refusal—it was a declaration that the act being committed was such a betrayal, and that she, as a child, understood this. The man she was talking to had given them candy and told them he knew where a prince was. And they had run down past the blocks of wood in the pulp yard to see—both little girls.
The man then told Ethel and Sara that if they drank what he gave them, they would see a prince. Sara had nothing to her name but one dress, and neither she nor Ethel had ever seen a prince. So they drank and got happy and then dizzy. And Ethel said she wanted to lie down. And suddenly Sara realized she had put Ethel in a terrible danger, because it seemed neither girl could walk well. She looked up at the man and smiled timidly, and then looked at the ground and pretended to be looking for something special.
She told him they had to go back to their house now, but he told them if they took their dresses off, they would be able to put other splendid dresses on because the prince was coming.
The man told Ethel to come back behind an old cardboard siding, where the new dress was. It had stars and diamonds on it, he said.
“No,” Sara said. But the man took them behind the pulpwood, in behind the cardboard. Ethel said she wanted to see the dress, and the man began to take Ethel’s dress off. But Sara stepped in between them and tried to tell the man she didn’t want the dress, that it didn’t matter if she saw the prince. That is all she could remember, stepping between him and Ethel and stamping her foot: “No, no, no.”
Sara was a little girl of six then, and now she did not know if she was still a virgin or not—she did not know anymore what it was that had happened. Only that Ethel had stood there watching as Sara said no. She thought Ethel too had forgotten it all. But one day last month, as if she remembered something, her eyes brightening, Ethel had said, “Now, Sara—your really, really prince has come, just like I prayed for you. See!”
There was one thing that worried Sara about Annette. And that was Annette’s friend, the young man who worked at the stables downriver, Ripp VanderTipp. And the very day she went to show Annette the diamond Ian had given her, Ripp was with her. Annette was troubled and worried when Sara came up to her, and Sara knew she had picked just the wrong time to show the ring.
When Annette saw this diamond, her face turned and her features distorted. She tried to be happy for her friend, but she knew she didn’t sound like she was. It was three times the size of the little diamond Harold had once bought her, when she had stayed up late practising how to sign her name Mrs. Harold Dew—with a flourish.
Ripp was there to tell Annette that Lonnie wanted to see her, and so she had better go down.
Annette went downriver, took off her shoes and sat in her little bedroom, where her life seemed very dark, where she could recall not one pleasant memory—where all her thoughts of being loved and wanted seemed a lie, and she had no idea what to do. She thought of the odd little house she lived in—thought too of her mom and dad and how they themselves lived, bickering over nothing. What, then, would happen to her?
She had trusted Lonnie—or had she? Well, she was wilful as well. And now, she realized, she had been naïve. She did not know if she was pregnant, because her periods had been irregular since she was fourteen. In fact, Dr. Hennessey had often been concerned about her, worried that she might develop blood clots, and had her tested at the hospital here and in Moncton. Yet nothing seemed to come of it except blood pressure tests. Dr. Hennessey told her that in years to come she must have regular checkups and perhaps someday she would need blood thinners. Why was that? Well, because he was an old man and believed he could tell things because of how thin the veins in her fingers were. Strange, she thought, that he’d picked up on this instantly when she turned thirteen. Twice since then she had developed blood clots in her legs; and for Annette who loved to dance this was now painful, and she had to take medication.
What was now happening seemed far more serious, however. And as yet she had gone to no doctor.
She’d had a pregnancy test, and had handed it to Lonnie yesterday and then left the shed—not able to look at it herself. And now he had told Ripp to have her come see him, and he was going to tell her if she was or was not pregnant. And if she was—because she had done what he had asked her to do—what would happen then? She thought about her mother, and what the gossips would say, and what others along Bonny Joyce would say. About Annette, who thought she was so much better than everyone else, who was so full of herself! And what about that man who supposedly had millions and was in love with her? It was a lie she had wanted to believe, because then she would get back at Harold—and them all. Yes, get back at them all—for why had nothing spectacular happened for her? So this rich man was her way to be spectacular. Yet she didn’t even know where this supposed millionaire really lived. She would be a laughingstock.
And when she had asked Lonnie about him two days ago, Lonnie got furious and it frightened her. He’d called her down, told her she still owed him $5,300 and that she had ruined herself. So now she was not only worried but sick and ill. She thought of Sara and all her happiness, while she, Annette the wise one, was alone and pregnant.
“What will happen now?” she asked the statue of the Virgin. “Please help me!”
A voice—and she could never say what voice it was; in fact, it must have come from deep inside her—said, “Sara. Go to Sara. She will know what to do. She will help you because she loves you. You must rely on her. She, in fact, loves you more than anyone else.”
But Annette’s deeper secret and more envious thought was this: if she did go to Sara, Sara would protect and help, which was fine—but then what would happen? There would be no chance with Ian—and this is what she was now secretly hoping for, a chance with Ian. So no, she couldn’t go to Sara. And this moment brought it home and she could no longer deny it.
She went to Lonnie Sullivan. As soon as she entered his shed, he looked at her sternly.
“Well, I thought you had more sense,” he said. “He didn’t use protection and either did you—what kind of girl are you? I had you pegged for someone a lot smarter than that there—I should have nothing to do with you.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose and looked at the newspaper, and made pencil marks on a certain page, trying to solve a crossword puzzle. “All you wanted was his money—he caught on.”
She sat down on a little stool and started to cry; she had never cried so much in her life.
He read the paper while she did. Then he tossed her a box of Kleenex. “There is an easy way to get out of this mess—go back to Harold and have him marry you. He’d be so happy to have you back he’d never know the difference.”
“No,” she said. “Leave me alone—leave me alone—I just want to be left alone.”
“Then there is someone else—just maybe?” Lonnie said. He sounded compassionate; he smiled and his eyes shone just a little bit.
“There is no one,” she said. She looked up at him, thinking exactly the same thing that he was. Their eyes met and both of them knew it.
Then he said, “But it’s too late now. You can’t hurt Sara—she has been too kind to you.”
“I don’t want to hurt Sara,” she said, lowering her eyes, as if he had read her thoughts. She began to tremble.
Lonnie thought for a moment, twisting a plastic cigar wrapper in his hand. “Well … who’s to say? All is fair in love and war! In fact, didn’t she steal Ian from you once? As far as I look at it—”
“No, she didn’t do that!”
“The way I look at it,” Lonnie said quietly, smiling, “as soon as he went to town … The way I look at it.”
She wanted to believe him more than she’d ever believed anyone in her life. In fact, she had to.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. What will I do?” But she glanced at him—yes, she knew whose fault this was. What a fo
ol she had been to travel down that long ugly road to Truro with him—and for what? Why had she believed anything he said?
Lonnie only smiled. “Do you love him?”
She made no answer. She just stared out at the clouds that seemed to rush by the window.
“Then use what a woman has to get him,” Lonnie said. “And if it does not work—go back to Harold, have the kid, and I will be there for you.”
“Who will find out?”
“Find out? No one in the world—who can you trust if not me?”
She left the table, left the shed, left the yard, shaken and confused.
Lonnie stood at the door watching her go. After a while he waved.
At this point there seemed to be nothing for Sara to worry about. Sara certainly loved Ian. Ian thought things were settled. Ethel and Mrs. Robb did as well.
So why did he marry Annette?
Many in town a generation ago say it was because Annette was Annette and simply willed it. It was as if suddenly she decided enough was enough: she would not give up a chance at a man with a small fortune—to her it was that—just because of loyalty to someone so plain who relied upon her so much.
The destructive forces in any friendship always end in betrayal.
It started simply enough. And Annette was in fact sent by Sara to him. That was a stroke of luck. Did Sara know this? Begging Annette to go, did she relinquish some superior hand to an equally superior twist of fate? As the brightest of my students, Terra Matheson, mentioned: just as Ian in his heart of hearts thought he must fail because he felt unworthy of the money, Sara’s test to Annette was of a friendship that was impossible.
Still, Sara herself bade her go to Ian. Annette needed this opening; she could not have done it by herself. And this one request by her friend made her determined to see it through.
So Annette went to Ian’s store one evening a few months before the wedding, a deceiver sent by the one she needed to deceive, to tell him that Sara was sick and could not come by to see him—they had been out shopping all day for things for the wedding and she was exhausted.
“She said she will call first thing in the morning,” Annette said.
Ian thanked her and stood a little apart, near two fridges that were pushed out in front because they were on sale. The place had the smell of wiring and lights, and a feeling of dispossession that always permeates dry electrical places, that always gives the impression of man at odds with himself and his own nature. It was a place where a somewhat gangly, serious and naïve boy was surrounded by things he had “fixed up.”
“I am a fixer upper” was how he described himself to her. He wanted to impress her finally. (But he also knew the large store was much more than that—it supplied two-thirds of the river with appliances, wiring, lumber and wallboard, and lumber and lights from his store had built fourteen houses in the upper subdivision in the past two years. That made him one of the most important suppliers on the river and one of the richest—and he had reinvented the store since he had bought it, to make all this possible.)
Annette turned to go and then turned back. “I think it’s her period,” she said. “It always gets to her!”
Embarrassed, he looked away. His hair was combed back on both sides and twisted at the front and top, like those boys from the 1950s. He put his right hand over his left elbow as if to protect himself from something and smiled clumsily.
Annette did that something: she touched his right arm quickly, squeezed it and then let go. He was staring at the spot on the arm she had touched, when she suddenly said that Sara owed her thirty dollars for a manicure and haircut, and she didn’t want to bother her now because she had so much on her mind, but she needed the money herself.
The lights shone like a draft or a funnel behind her, as if she stood directly inside some splendid radiance that allowed her dress to become almost transparent. It was at this moment she realized that he could not take his eyes off her.
“Well,” he said, coming to himself, “here.” And he immediately put his hand in his pocket and gave her thirty dollars. (He had a lot of money in his hand, but he did not hold it as Lonnie held his.)
“Oh,” she said. “Sara said she would pay it.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Then, seeing her peering here and there, he asked her to come in and see his store. He took her from one end to the other—up the stairs to the second and then the third floor. Everything was in order; everything had a price tag and a serial number—it all looked so impressive to her. From the top-floor window she could see all the way to the bridge, and beyond—to small lights twinkling far away in the darkness.
“Is that Bonny Joyce Road—that small speck way off?” she said in a capricious beautiful tone, turning her face toward his.
“No, it’s another ten miles down and beyond the islands.”
“Ah yes—but this river is where we spent our youth.”
“Yes.”
“And now our youth is gone—drifted away somewhere. I do not know where—but it has, hasn’t it?” she said. “Well, let’s go back downstairs,” she said, to indicate propriety.
It was a warm night and she lingered. So he locked up (childishly a bit pleased to have keys that hung off his belt) and they walked down the street together, he slightly ahead of her and not knowing what decorum was. He could hear the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk, the smell of darkness in the warm siding. She was Sara’s best friend, he told himself, so walking with her was fine—and even more than fine; it was somehow required. That was it: it was a requirement to walk with his fiancée’s best friend. There. He felt better saying this and sighed.
“Maybe I should go over to see Sara—is she running a temperature?”
“I think she’ll be fine,” Annette said. “Besides, she was sleeping when I left.”
It did not matter that this sounded false—or, in fact, it mattered in a good way. It surprised Ian how some small part of him wanted it to be a lie, for that indicated something else, something new and special, between them. He knew this was how shallow men thought—and he knew too that at times this is how all men thought when it came to someone else’s fiancée or wife.
They watched a nighthawk fly beneath the streetlight near Fransblo’s and heard a bicycle up the back lane.
She wore a short strapless summer dress. She had her nails painted pink and had a small ankle bracelet. She was, to him, spellbinding.
He noticed now how she had done Sara’s hair and nails to be exactly like hers, and how this suddenly defined the two women. More importantly, she wore the same perfume that he remembered her wearing that day she’d tossed her head and turned away from him.
She was, in fact, a small-town girl trying to look chic, and in a way this was flattering to him, flattering and poignant—it made her seem exposed in a melancholy way, teetering on the brink of an elliptical desire that could never be fulfilled, like those young country girls he remembered standing in white high heels in the lime-coloured dust of evening. He remembered so many women like that now—and all were remembered in a sudden affecting way—their dreams so elusive, and in the end unfulfilled. In some way he wanted to take all the burden of pain away.
He drove a Mustang and smoked cigarettes—all this was, in a way, self-deceiving. That is, he thought that in order to be perceived in a new way, he had to look like a new man, whether he was or not. Now, suddenly—and it gave him almost a fright—Annette looked at him with a glance that said she understood all of this. It was a glance that could make men go weak with autumnal desire. And men did and would. And Annette knew this in a second.
Caught in that moment, she said, “Do you know what I need the money for?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, the money isn’t to buy dope—I’m not a dope fiend,” she explained. That is, she knew quite well his reputation for being old-fashioned—and of course, in most ways she was too. She loved old songs that spoke of broken hearts and women who had been deceived.
&nb
sp; He laughed uncomfortably and turned to wait for her.
She pulled up her skirt very slowly now, to beyond her thighs. “Legs waxed.” She winked. “I need to get them done as soon as I can—hopefully tomorrow.”
She dropped her skirt quickly, and blushed.
He stared at her legs and then turned his head.
“My legs look bad?”
“No” was all he managed to say. Anyone else doing this would have been more than obvious. Annette doing it was lively, and somehow wonderfully and innocently expected. That was her terrible potency—like a small pinprick from an exotic flower that caused a poisonous heartache. He lit another cigarette with his Zippo clicking in his hand, that self-aggrandizing motion on a dark street that is always a moratorium on class. But he could not be blamed—he had struggled so hard to be one of the bright young men in town.
Her face was full and mischievous, and had a kind of remarkable maritime beauty, beauty hereditary and complemented by her accent, which was a mixture of French and Irish lilt. Ian thought of her as “new” in the way she moved and attracted him. Not new in the way the university kids were, with all their baffling and self-conscious concerns so bogus to him—but new because she was of a tradition that would never change. When he had known her before, she had acted nothing like this with him. She had really tormented him, like a cat might with a mouse. Now everything seemed to be done only for him. She took his cigarette, held it and took a dismissive drag, and handed it back to him as they walked. When he put it in his mouth, he was overcome by the idea that their mouths had met.
That is, she made him feel exactly as she wanted him to.
He was now worried she might change her mind again about him. And without knowing it, he was as infatuated as he had always been.
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